Getting worried

Hi all, I am taking the test this Thursday and I am starting to get worried now. I have been taking a lot of mock exams over the past week (scores ranging from the mid 50s to the mid 80s) and I am doing poorly on the IO, AWT Layouts (mainly GridBag), and memorization of class heirarchies... does anyone have any tips (besides postponing the exam and studying more which I cant really do now) especially for the IO stuff that might help a panicy test-ee? Thanks! Nate

Nate one of the best ways to understand IO is to code some. Make a simple class, that creates an instance of File, create a FileWriter, and pass some Byte arrays to it. See how iit works, that is the best way. I am sure you have already used the tutorials. On GridBagLayout. Think of a spreadsheet. Do you use Excel. If yes have you used the spread over columns selection. That's like GridBagLayout. Ok you have this grid, as big as you want say 10x10, you can place components on them. You can tell it to stretch over colums or rows. Yuo can tell it to align to the left or the right, you can tell it how much space to put between the components. They way you tell all of this information is through a GridBagConstraints object. Now the thing they do that is for ease, instead of creating a seperate GridBadContraint object for every component you put on the GUI, you can reuse the same one, just change the elements that you wnt different from the previous component that you added. This is slightly similar to the HTML Table, how you can put in rowspan, columnspan attributes in the <td> tag. Hope that helps a little. Mark

Originally posted by Mark Spritzler: Nate one of the best ways to understand IO is to code some. Make a simple class, that creates an instance of File, create a FileWriter, and pass some Byte arrays to it. See how iit works, that is the best way. I am sure you have already used the tutorials. On GridBagLayout. Think of a spreadsheet. Do you use Excel. If yes have you used the spread over columns selection. That's like GridBagLayout. Ok you have this grid, as big as you want say 10x10, you can place components on them. You can tell it to stretch over colums or rows. Yuo can tell it to align to the left or the right, you can tell it how much space to put between the components. They way you tell all of this information is through a GridBagConstraints object. Now the thing they do that is for ease, instead of creating a seperate GridBadContraint object for every component you put on the GUI, you can reuse the same one, just change the elements that you wnt different from the previous component that you added. This is slightly similar to the HTML Table, how you can put in rowspan, columnspan attributes in the <td> tag. Hope that helps a little. Mark

Thanks Mark! That does help... and I have been writing example for the io stuff and I think I am on the right path, io-wise anyway... on to the gridbag now.